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"I've seen 14-year-old girls with infected arms who have been stuck a bunch of times by people who aren't very good at hitting veins. And I'm frequently surprised by the number of people who don't use it every day but don't feel bad about dabbling in it. They seem to be unaware of the precipice they're hanging over."
Janet Cousrouf, Rimrock's director of nursing, says crank carries with it almost a two-week residue of paranoia. "Since the detox time is longer than most companies are willing to pay for, our biggest problem is insurance."
Cousrouf frankly despairs about the crank plague and in particular its spread from generation to generation. "A lot of the crankers are products of crank mothers, or they have fetal alcohol syndrome. And we're seeing a whole new era of fetal drug syndrome--underdeveloped brain stems, SIDS deaths." Cousrouf believes crank is one of the main culprits in these cases.
But from their sober point of view, doctors and nurses can tell you only so much. The best way to see what crank has done to Billings--and perhaps understand the appeal of a drug made from drain-cleaning crystals--is to spend time with crankers, both active and reformed. A group of them loiter outside the Montana Rescue Mission, a private Christian charity that offers a bed to crash in and, if they choose, a religion-based recovery program, Reality and Christ.
Tom, 24, a husky blond kid who says he has been drug free for 17 days, is fresh out of jail for stealing a handgun he planned to sell for drug cash. The gun belonged to his girlfriend's father, who happened to be a deputy sheriff. "How dumb can you get?" Tom asks. After flashing a driver's license photo to show how much thinner he was in his meth days, Tom effuses about his newfound love of Christ. A few minutes later he reaches into his jeans jacket and pulls out a scorched, homemade glass crank pipe.
"To be honest," he says, "if I had some now, I'd smoke it."
Huddled on the ground against a wall, Justin and Kim, 24 and 18, scoff at Tom's pipe. They're bangers--they shoot their crank--and anyone who does different is crazy, they say. "We've been off it 11 days," says Justin. "I'm trying to get my tolerance back down so it won't take me so much to get spun out," he explains. As narcotics go, crank is famously cheap--a $20 bundle keeps you buzzing for up to 12 jaw-grinding, heart-pounding hours--but frequent users still have trouble affording it. For one thing, they tend to get grandiose while high. A recovering addict (in his one year of crank use, he went from reigning as high school homecoming king to serving a robbery sentence in a state penitentiary) remembers buying drinks for the house every time he set foot in a strange bar.
When asked how he's staying away from the needle, Justin produces a plastic medicine dropper and pokes his arm with it. "Calms me down," he says. "I quit smoking the same way, by sucking on a crayon." Like so many other Billings geeters--yet one more slang term--Justin is a teller of wild tales. He shows off the sunken veins in his arms and describes how he once had to gaff his shot of crank--inject it straight into his jugular vein--while watching himself in a rearview mirror. "The jugular," he says, nodding earnestly, "the only vein in the body that won't roll over on you."